I painted my kitchen and dining room today. Real, grown-up colors. It’s kinda freaking me out.

When we first moved into the house, there were four different colors of beige in the kitchen. No joke. It was awful.

 

See? So, we kind of over-compensated with color, and made some mistakes tinting our own glaze, and ended up with this:

 

Whoops. Aaand…now my kitchen looks like a taco bell. I certainly don’t have anything against Mexican restaurants (some of my favorite food comes from them!) but that yellow was…uh…not what I was going for. I really, really liked that color green, though. These bold, vibrant colors were a sort of reflection of how I interacted with the world. Nothing to hide, a little (or a lot) too brash for comfort, doesn’t really match, but warm and capable of a lot of fun if given the chance. It was my Katie kitchen.

But honestly, I never liked that orange. So when I heard there was a sale and a lovely friend offered to watch my kids while I painted today, I jumped at the chance to find a calmer color to allow the purple cabinets to really stand out. It turns out that sometimes letting certain things be quiet so that when something is loud people know it’s worth some attention can be a good thing. Who knew? (I know. Lots of people. It’s a thing.)

I feel sad, in a way, to lose the bold colors. More than I thought I would. I know they are still there, underneath that great grey-green (Rudyard Kipling, anyone? My parents read the Just So Stories to me when I was a kid and I always loved that phrase), and that makes me smile. The fact that the saturation changes a little as I mature does not devalue the passionate colors I gravitated toward before. It’s just, now my kitchen goes by Kate. But you can still call it Katie, you know, if you want to. It doesn’t mind.